Sunday 29 September 2013

"They couldn't bear to stop being rich."

On facebook, for International Book Week, someone said:

pick up the closest book to you;
open it to page 52;
read the fifth sentence on that page;
post that sentence on facebook without revealing the title.

My sentence was:

"They couldn't bear to stop being rich."

So does any Poul Anderson fan know which book that is from?

I am rereading The Devil's Game and, as usual with Poul Anderson's works, finding more in it than I had expected. We have just ordered The Snows Of Ganymede on Amazon. It is an Anderson Double so I was hoping to read another early work for the first time. However, googling discloses that the other novel in the volume is War Of The Wing Men aka The Man Who Counts, the first Nicholas van Rijn novel.

Thus, one short Psychotechnic Institute novel and one Technic Civilization/Polesotechnic League novel are collected in a single volume. Confusing but worth reading. "Psychotechnic" and "Technic" are earlier and later future histories, the first emphasizing the need for social control, or "coordination," the second emphasizing freedom, as represented by the pre-Imperial Polesotechnic League period and the post-Imperial Commonalty period.

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